‘Stranger Things’ Season 5 Review: A Mess of Epic Proportions

There’s no way to talk about Stranger Things without touching on its cultural relevance. There have been thousands of shows that have been released since the start of this show, and almost all of them have either been cancelled, ended, or faded into some level of obscurity. There are some here and there that have been massive pieces of pop culture, but none more so than Stranger Things. Read our Stranger Things Season 5 Review below

For better or worse, Stranger Things is an era-defining show. It’s swept up generations of fans, only helped by how long the final two seasons took to release to attract a new generation of fans. It’s proven time and time again that it will always be the most popular show of the year when it releases a season, which begs the question now that it’s over, will it get Lost in the mix.

Lost was a cultural icon in every way, but ratings slipped as the show went on and eventually after it ended, it didn’t stand the test of time relative to the popularity it had. It’s still an immensely popular show people recommend, but it still gets lost in the mix with shows that were less popular at the time that have taken over once they ended, like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and many others. The truth is the shows that people keep recommending after they’re over, more often than not, are ones that left a sweet taste in their mouth.

Stranger Things, in my eyes, didn’t do that. It failed to capture what made the previous seasons uniquely good. The show was never perfect but compare the final season to any that came before it and there’s a stark difference in quality. The show hasn’t just fallen off narratively—it’s also fallen off in every single aspect. It’s a mess of epic proportions which is inexplicable.

This show has always built itself up on both the mystery of what’s going in the Upside Down and the characters. The vast number of characters on the show to some degree, is unprecedented, especially as each season has added more and more. Even this season there were multiple additions that make sense in the context of the story they’re telling, but they take away from time that the older characters need.

A large issue is the characters are stripped of everything that made them stand out. There are so many scenes where the voices of these characters feel the same. So many lines feel like they are written so anyone can say them instead of being tailor-made for the character.

A good example is literally every single group scene in the show. Every scene featuring more than 3 or 4 characters is simply the worst type of scene in the show. They are almost always exposition dumps that feel so deeply unnatural both in the writing and delivery. They all finish each other’s sentences in a way that feels like they’re teeing each other up to say the line instead of it feeling natural. None of the exposition feels like it adds much. It is the most uninteresting use of telling instead of showing which simply doesn’t work.

It’s hard to find a distinction in whether it’s the actor’s fault or the fault of the writing or directing when it comes to a performance. Don’t get me wrong there are some moments and even whole performances that work but it feels like a lot of the cast is either checked out, can’t deliver a line properly to save their lives, or simply seem uninterested, which makes me lean toward it being a direction and writing issue. The acting as a whole takes away any ounce of chemistry between the scenes—chemistry that the show thrived upon in previous seasons. The magic of the show were the character interactions while dealing with the plot at hand or simply just having fun. Season 5 feels like it strips all of that and makes them robots with no personality to make up for the issues with the plot.

The plot itself is uninteresting, to say the least. Vecna has lost everything that made him interesting. None of the scenes with him make him all that intimidating despite Jaime Campbell Bower’s best efforts. None of the stakes matter in the show. Every single season builds up world-ending stakes and all that truly happens is a side character they introduced earlier in the season ends up dying. It’s not that any of the main characters need to die but something interesting has to be done to build up stakes which this season especially fails to do.

Every single scene that any of the main characters featured in some sort of battle don’t work mostly because you can tell nothing is going to happen to a single one of them. It feels repetitive, and it’s not like the season features any great set pieces to make up for that. The rule of cool always prevails but Stranger Things Season 5 has maybe one cool set piece. The rest are fine at best and horrible at worst. A part of that is the visual aspect of the show being really bad. A show that once looked quite good relative to everything else on TV now looks more generic than ever. Hell, it looks ugly more often than it doesn’t. Everything in the Upside Down looks incredibly drab and bland. The final major set piece should be a visual spectacle, but instead it looks like it was an afterthought.

This is the one of if not the most expensive, season of television ever made, for god’s sake. This is a show renowned for its visual identity, but now it’s a mess in every which way. The action set pieces aren’t directed well, and the editing is shoddy at best, with it cutting all over the place.

Everything about this show has been downgraded to the point where it has no identity. Everything that made it unique are simply generic at best and downright awful at worst.

The one positive thing I’ll say is I quite liked the final scene and the ending. The epilogue itself is just fine but the final scene feels so different from the rest of the season. The chemistry between the cast is back, and there’s a fun, infectious part of it that saves it in its final moments. But it just comes too late into the game for it to matter. There’s a basketball meme “Chris Paul hits a huge three to cut the lead down to 42,” that defines this season and particularly that moment better than I ever could. Sure, you add 3 points to your board but you’re losing the game by such a big margin that you’ll never make it back. It’s a scene that adds to the show but what came before strips it so much that it doesn’t even matter.

Truth be told, I hope new generations of fans find Stranger Things as I did back in 2016. Mileage varies and there are a lot of ups and downs along the way, but the journey was worth it. Season 5 to some degree makes me think much less of the show, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned watching television is that neither a bad final season nor an ending can take away from what came before, even if it hurts the show as a whole. It hurts the cultural relevance of the show for the future but this is a show that will still be shared for years to come which will be its legacy regardless of how people feel about the final season. I’m ultimately disappointed, but I’m still glad the show was made. I hope the Duffers are able to capture the magic of the earlier seasons of this show in their future work because they have a lot of potential if they can.

Stranger Things Season 5 stars Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Millie Bobby Brown, Noah Schnapp, Caleb McLaughlin, Gaten Matarazzo, Finn Wolfhard, Sadie Sink, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Joe Keery, Maya Hawke, Brett Gelman, Linda Hamilton, and Jamie Campbell Bower.

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